Thousands Plan March on D.C. To Retrace March Into History

By DeNeen L. Brown
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON

Russell Williams rode all night from New York to get to the 1963 civil
rights March on Washington. He would like to tell people now that he was
there, that when Martin Luther King Jr. told a quarter of a million
marchers, "I have a dream," he heard it and wept.

But when King rose on that hot August afternoon to give the speech of the
century, Williams was in the bathroom.

"Sometimes I have this practical mind. I thought, `This speech I can read.
Everybody will be listening to it,'" Williams said. "Now is my chance to
go."

Thirty years later, he regrets not waiting.

Williams, now a 50-year-old schoolteacher who lives in Hagerstown, Md.,
plans to be among the thousands who are expected to return to the Lincoln
Memorial Saturday to mark the 30th anniversary of the march. Out of a sense
of "reunion, a sense of history," he will return with the poster he carried
in 1963.

The official commemoration begins today with a People's University on the
Mall, a `60s-style teach-in with sessions on racism and other topics. The
march will start at noon tomorrow from the Washington Monument to trace the
steps of those earlier marchers to the Lincoln Memorial.

This time, the rallying cry is "Jobs, Justice and Peace," not just for
blacks but for Latinos, Asians, women, American Indians, homosexuals and
laborers, to name only several of the 500 interest groups sponsoring the
event. Participants in the first march recall a more basic demand: equal
rights and jobs for blacks.

On Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1963, people poured into the city by foot, car, bus
and train. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom would be the
biggest demonstration the city had ever seen. That was evident from the
traffic-clogged highways and from out-of-towners telephoning District
relatives and friends to find a place to rest after the march.

Williams remembers that buses coming from New York, Philadelphia and other
northern cities were parked on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, waiting
their turn to inch into the city. When his bus finally arrived at the Mall,
"I got out and started counting buses. I got up to about 1,000. There were
buses everywhere."

Williams started toward the Lincoln Memorial to get as close to the stage
as he could. He hung his sign -- "Higher Minimum Wages, Coverage for All
Workers" -- around his neck with string: "They had told us not to use wood
because wood could be used as a weapon, and we didn't want to be arrested
carrying a weapon around," he recalled.

But despite warnings that the march might explode into violence, many
people who were there remember the unbelievable calm that swept over the
city and the pains people took to be polite.